Saturday Night Live: “Melissa McCarthy/Haim”

Melissa McCarthy’s fifth time hosting joins last fall’s Tom Hanks-hosted episode and the Alec Baldwin and Scarlett Johansson-hosted episodes from earlier this year as the very best of a reinvigorated Saturday Night Live. Now, with just one episode left in Season 42, it is fair to say that we are watching the show’s finest (i.e., most consistently funny) season since the late 1980s.
There are many who will attribute the show’s recent resurgence to the current U.S. political climate. To be sure, it is easier to make satirical hay from the ineptitudes of political leaders we despise than those we admire. Many of the season’s brightest moments have been Trump-inspired (Alec Baldwin and Melissa McCarthy will compete for Emmys for their Trump and Spicer appearances this season), but Trump didn’t give us Hanks’s David S. Pumpkins, Kate McKinnon’s Debette Goldry or Cecily Strong’s Cathy Anne. To bestow SNL MVP honors on the new president gives him way too much credit.
Rather, credit for this best-in-decades season should be given to the show’s re-built writing staff, led by Chris Kelly, Sarah Schneider, Bryan Tucker and Kent Sublette. These head writers, their team and SNL’s repertory company has been relentlessly, ruthlessly funny this season—like people with something to prove: that there is a place for a major network sketch comedy show in the diverse and crowded landscape of broadcast comedy.
Saturday Night Live matters again because it’s good again.
“Melissa McCarthy’s Mother’s Day Monologue” gives us something new: a presumably unsuspecting audience member is taken on a backstage tour of the studio, culminating in her own, host-style entrance and introduction. It’s a cute bit, making an everymom the hero, and fitting for an episode that finds everywoman McCarthy joining John Goodman, Tom Hanks and Justin Timberlake (and fifteen others) in the elite SNL guest host “5-Timers” club. (During McCarthy’s goodnights at the end of the show she seems legitimately surprised to be greeted by 5-Timer Steve Martin—and gifted with her own 5-Timer smoking jacket.)
Expectations were sky high for Melissa McCarthy’s return to SNL as White House press secretary Sean Spicer. And with “Sean Spicer Returns,” she doesn’t disappoint. That she finds a way to push past Spicer’s bluster to his humanity is a tribute to McCarthy’s profound talent (the boorish know-it-all with a heart of gold is her go-to). The sketch gives us a brokenhearted Sean Spicer on a pitiful, podium-riding quest to find Donald Trump and beg for his love and approval. This piece is a little stronger than the very good “Lester Holt Cold Open” which also features Alec Baldwin’s now legendary Donald Trump in full squinty scowl. One wonders what will happen during SNL’s summer hiatus when we don’t have Baldwin to help us cope with weekly Trump dramas. (Hey NBC—any chance for a summer SNL special?)